Consumer drones have become a big business, you can get one for as little as $50 and end up spending thousands on dollars on really powerful drones with tons of features. Qualcomm wants a piece of this pie as well but it’s not going to start selling its own drones, rather the company has come up with Snapdragon Flight, it’s a reference platform that seeks to advanced consumer drones with high performance capabilities.
Snapdragon Flight is an optimized 58x40mm board made just for drones and robotics applications, it’s based on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor with robust connectivity features paired with advanced drone software and developing tools.
It essentially brings all technologies that have defined the mobile industry onto a single board for consumer drones, allowing OEMs to build drones that are smaller, lighter, much easier to use and offer better features with improved battery life. Yuneec is going to be the first company to release a consumer drone based on the Snapdragon Flight reference platform next year.
The platform will tout features like 4K camera support and 720p encoding for first person view, dual-band 2×2 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, and 5 Hz GNSS location capabilities, support for a plethora of new sensors as well as for Qualcomm’s Quick Charge fast battery charging technology.
Select OEMs can get their hands on the Snapdragon Flight starting today, we’ll start seeing this technology in commercially available drones from next year.